Chapter VII: Part 7

Would that it might never awaken, and that all might remain as now—no more happiness than that of peace, but neither any misery nor irking unrest! Would that the present might close as a bud closes around itself, and that no spring would follow!

Fennimore called. She had been lying awake for some time, too happy in being free from pain to think of speaking. Now she wanted to get up and light the lamp, but Niels continued to act as physician, and compelled her to lie still. It was not good for her to get up yet; he had matches and could easily find the lamp.

When he had lit it, he put it on the flower stand in the corner, where its milky white globe shone softly veiled by the delicate, slumbering leaves of an acacia. The room was just light enough so that they could see each other’s face.

He sat down in front of her, and they spoke about the rain and said how lucky it was that Erik had taken his rain-coat, and how wet poor Trine would be. Then their conversation came to a standstill.

Fennimore’s thoughts were not quite awake yet, and in her weakness it seemed pleasant to lie thus musing without speaking. Nor was Niels inclined to talk, for he was still under the spell of the afternoon’s long silence.

“Do you like this house?” Fennimore asked at last.

“Why yes, fairly well.”

“Really? Do you remember the furniture at home?”

“At Fjordby? Yes indeed, perfectly.”

“You don’t know how I love it, and how I long for it sometimes. The things we have here don’t belong to us—they are only rented—and have no association with anything, and we are not going to live with them any longer than we stay in this place. You may think it queer, but I assure you, I often feel lonely here among all these strange pieces of furniture that stand around here so indifferent and stupid and take me for what I am without caring the least bit about me. And as I know they are not going with me—that they will just stay here and be rented by other people—I can’t get fond of them or interested in them as I should if I knew that my home would always be theirs, and that whatever came to me of good or ill would come in the midst of them. Do you think it childish? Perhaps it is, but I can’t help it.”

“I don’t know what it is, but I have felt it too. When I was left alone abroad, my watch stopped, and when it came back from the watchmaker and was going as before, it was—just what you mean. I liked the feeling; there was something peculiar about it, something genuinely good.”

“Yes indeed! Oh, I should have kissed it, if I had been you.”

“Would you?”

“Do you know,” she said suddenly, “you have never told me anything about Erik as a boy? What was he like?”

“Everything that is good and fine, Fennimore. Splendid, brave—a boy’s ideal of a boy, not exactly a mother’s or a teacher’s ideal, but the other, which is so much better.”

“How did you get along together? Were you very fond of each other?”

“Yes, I was in love with him, and he didn’t mind—that is about how it was. We were very different. I always wanted to be a poet and become famous, but what do you suppose he said he wanted to be, one day when I asked him?—An Indian, a real red Indian with war paint and all the rest! I remember that I couldn’t understand it at all. It was incomprehensible to me how any one could want to be a savage—civilized creature that I was!”

“But was it not strange, then, that he should become an artist?” said Fennimore, and there was something cold and hostile in her tone, as she asked.

Niels noticed it with a little start. “Not at all,” he answered; “it is really rare that people become artists with the whole of their nature. And such strong fellows overflowing with vitality like Erik often have an unutterable longing for what is fine-grained and delicate: for an exquisite virginal coldness, a lofty sweetness—I hardly know how to express it. Outwardly they may be robust and full-blooded enough, even coarse, and no one suspects what strange, romantic, sentimental secrets they carry about with them, because they are so bashful—spiritually bashful, I mean—that no pale little maiden can be more shy about her soul than are these big, hard-stepping menfolks. Don’t you understand, Fennimore, that such a secret, which can’t be told in plain words right out in common every-day air, may dispose a man to be an artist? And they can’t express it in words, they simply can’t; we have to believe that it is there and lives its quiet life within them, as the bulb lives in the earth; for once in a while they do send fragrant, delicately tinted flowers up to the light. Do you understand?—Don’t demand anything for yourself of this blossoming strength, believe in it, be glad to nourish it and to know that it is there.—Forgive me, Fennimore, but it seems to me that you and Erik are not really good to each other. Can’t you make a change? Don’t think of who is right or how great the wrong is, and don’t treat him according to his deserts—how would even the best of us fare if we got our deserts! No, think of him as he was in the hour when you loved him most; believe me, he is worthy of it. You must not measure and weigh. There are moments in love, I know, full of bright, solemn ecstasy, when we would give our lives for the beloved if need be. Is not that true? Remember it now, Fennimore, for his sake and your own.”

He was silent.

She said nothing either, but lay very still with a melancholy smile on her lips, pale as a flower.

Then she half rose and stretched out her hand to Niels. “Will you be my friend?” she asked.

“I am your friend, Fennimore,” and he took her hand.

“Will you, Niels?”

“Always,” he replied, lifting the hand to his lips reverently.

When he rose, it seemed to Fennimore that he held himself more erect than she had ever seen him before.

A little later Trine came in to announce her return, and then there was tea, and at last the rowing back through the dreary rain.

Toward morning Erik came home, and when Fennimore saw him by the cold, truthful light of dawn, preparing to go to bed, heavy and unsteady with drink, his eyes glazed from gambling and his face dirty-pale after the sleepless night, then all the fair words Niels had spoken seemed to her quite visionary. The bright promises she had made to her own heart fainted and paled before the oncoming day—vapory dreams and fumes of fancy: a fairy flock of lies!

What was the use of struggling with this weight dragging them both down? It was futile to lighten it by lies; their life would never have its old buoyancy. The frost had been there, and the wealth of vines and creepers and clustering roses and blossoms fairer than roses that had entwined them had shed every tiny leaf, lost every blossom, and nothing remained but the tough, naked withes binding them together in an unbreakable tether. What did it avail that she roused the feelings of former days to an artificial life by the warmth of memories, that she put her idol up on its pedestal again, that she called back the light of admiration to her eyes, the words of adoration to her lips, and the flush of happiness to her cheeks! What did it all avail, when he would not take upon himself to be the priest of the idol and so help her to a pious fraud? He! He did not even remember her love. Not one of her words echoed in his ears, not one of all their days was hidden in his soul.

No, dead and cold was the ardent love of their hearts. The fragrance, the glamor, and the tremulous tones—all had been wafted away. There they sat, from force of habit, he with his arm around her waist, she with her head resting on his shoulder, drearily sunk in silence, forgetting each other; she, to remember the glorious hero he had never been; he, to transform her in his dreams to the ideal which he now always saw shining in the sky high above her head. Such was their life together, and the days came and went without bringing any change, and day after day they gazed out over the desert of their lives, and told themselves that it was a desert, that there were no flowers nor any hope of flowers or springs or green palms.

As the autumn advanced, Erik’s drinking-bouts became more frequent. What was the use, he said to Niels, of sitting at home waiting for ideas that never came, until his thoughts turned to stone in his head? Moreover, he did not get much comfort from Niels’s society; he needed people with some grit in them, people of lusty flesh and blood, not a whim-wham of delicate nerves. Niels and Fennimore were therefore left much alone, for Niels came over to Marianelund every day.

The covenant of friendship they had made and the talk they had had on that Sunday afternoon put them at their ease with each other, and, lonely as they both were, they drew closer together in a warm and tender friendship, which soon gained a strong hold over both. It absorbed them so that their thoughts, whether they were together or apart, always turned to this bond, as birds building the same nest look on everything they gather or pass by with the one pleasant goal of making the nest snug and comfortable for each other and themselves.

If Niels came while Erik was away, they nearly always, even on rainy and stormy days, took long walks in the woods behind the garden. They had fallen in love with that forest, and grew fonder of it as they watched the summer life die out. There were a thousand things to see. First, how the leaves turned yellow and red and brown, then how they fell off, whirling on a windy day in yellow swarms, or softly rustling in still air, single leaf after leaf, down against the stiff boughs and between the pliant brown twigs. And when the leaves fell from trees and bushes, the hidden secrets of summer were revealed in nest upon nest. What treasures on the ground and on the branches, dainty seeds and bright-colored berries, brown nuts, shining acorns and exquisite acorn cups, tassels of coral on the barberry, polished black berries on the buckthorn, and scarlet urns on the dog-rose. The bare beeches were finely dotted with prickly beechnuts, and the roan bent under the weight of its red clusters, acid in fragrance like apple cider. Late brambleberries lay black and brown among the wet leaves at the wayside; red whortleberries grew among the heather, and the wild raspberries brought forth their dull crimson fruit for the second time. The ferns turned all colors as they faded, and the moss was a revelation, not only the deep, luscious moss in the hollows and on the slopes, but the faint, delicate growth on the tree-trunks, resembling what one might imagine the cornfields of the elves to be as it sent forth the finest of stalks with dark brown buds like ears of corn at the tip.

They scoured the forest from end to end, eager to find all its treasures and marvels. They had divided it between them as children do; the part on one side of the road was Fennimore’s property, and that on the other side was Niels’s, and they would compare their realms and quarrel about which was the more glorious. Everything there had names—clefts and hillocks, paths and stiles, ditches and pools; and when they found a particularly magnificent tree, they gave that too a name. In this way they took complete possession and created a little world of their own which no one else knew and no one else was at home in, and yet they had no secret which all the world might not have heard.

As yet they had not.

But love was in their hearts, and was not there, as the crystals are present in a saturated solution, and yet are not present, not until a splinter or the merest particle of the right matter is thrown into the solution, releasing the slumbering atoms as if by magic, and they rush to meet one another, joining and riveting themselves together according to unsearchable laws, and in the same instant there is crystal—crystal.

So it was a trifle that made them feel they loved.

There is nothing to tell. It was a day like all other days, when they were alone together in the sitting-room, as they had been a hundred times before; their conversation was about things of no moment, and that which happened was outwardly as common and as every-day-like as possible. It was nothing except that Niels stood looking out of the window, and Fennimore came over to him and looked out too. That was all, but it was enough, for in a flash like lightning, the past and present and future were transformed for Niels Lyhne by the consciousness that he loved the woman standing by his side, not as anything bright and sweet and happy and beautiful that would lift him to ecstasy or rapture—such was not the nature of his love—but he loved her as something he could no more do without than the breath of life itself, and he reached out, as a drowning man clutches, and pressed her hand to his heart.

She understood him. With almost a scream, in a voice full of terror and agony, she cried out to him an answer and a confession: “Oh, _yes_, Niels!” and snatched away her hand in the same instant. A moment she stood, pale and shrinking, then sank down with one knee in an upholstered chair, hiding her face against the harsh velvet of the back, and sobbed aloud.

Niels stood a few seconds as though blinded, groping around among the bulb-glasses for support. It was only for a very few seconds; then he stepped over to the chair where she was lying, and bent over without touching her, resting one hand on the back of the chair.

“Don’t be so unhappy, Fennimore! Look up and let us talk about it. Will you, or will you not? Don’t be afraid! Let us bear it together, my own love! Come, try if you can’t!”

She raised her head slightly and looked up at him. “Oh, God, what shall we do! Isn’t it terrible, Niels! Why should such a thing happen to me? And how lovely it all could have been—so happy!” and she sobbed again.

“Should I not have spoken?” he moaned. “Poor Fennimore, would you rather never have known it?”

She raised her head again and caught his hand. “I wish I knew it and were dead. I wish I were in my grave and knew it, that would be good—oh, so peaceful and good!”

“It is bitter for us both, Fennimore, that the first thing our love brings us should be only misery and tears. Don’t you think so?”

“You must not be hard on me, Niels. I can’t help it. You can’t see it as I do—I am the one that should be strong, because I am the one that is bound. I wish I could take my love and force it back into the most secret depth of my soul and lock it in and be deaf to all its wailing and its prayers, and then tell you to go far, far away; but I can’t, I have suffered so much, I can’t suffer that too—I can’t, Niels. I can’t live without you—see, can I? Do you think I can?”

She rose and flung herself on his breast.

“Here I am, and I won’t let you go; I won’t send you away, while I sit here alone in the old darkness. It is like a bottomless pit of loathing and misery. I won’t throw myself into it. I would rather jump into the fjord, Niels. Even if the new life brings other agonies, at least they are new agonies, and haven’t the dull sting of the old, and can’t stab home like the old, which know my heart so cruelly well. Am I talking wildly? Yes, of course I am, but it is so good to talk to you without any reserve and without having to be careful not to say what I have no right to. For now you have the first right of all! I wish you could take me wholly, so that I could belong to you utterly and not to any one else at all. I wish you could lift me out of all relations that hedge me in!”

“We must break through them, Fennimore. I will arrange everything as well as possible. Don’t be afraid! Some day, before any one suspects anything, we shall be far away.”

“No, no, we mustn’t run away, anything but that, anything else rather than have my parents hear their daughter had run away. It is impossible! I will never do it. By God in heaven, Niels, I will never do it.”

“Oh, but you must, girlie, you must. Can’t you see all the baseness and ugliness that will rise and close in around us everywhere, if we stay, all the lies and deceptions that will entangle us and drag us down? I won’t have you smooched by all that. I refuse to let it eat into our love like corroding rust.”

But she was immovable.

“You don’t know what you are condemning us to,” he said sadly. “It would be far better to crush under iron heels now instead of sparing. Believe me, Fennimore, we must let our love be everything to us, the first and only thing in the world, that which must be saved, even at the cost of stabbing where we would rather heal and bringing sorrow where we would rather keep every shadow of sorrow far away. If we don’t do that, you will see that the yoke we bend our necks under now will weigh on us and at last force us to our knees, unmercifully, inexorably.—A fight on our knees, you don’t know how hard that is! Shall we fight the fight anyway, girlie, side by side, against everything?”

* * * * *

For the first few days Niels persisted in his attempts to persuade her to flight. Then he began to picture to himself what a blow it would be to Erik if he were to come home one day and find friend and wife gone away together, and by degrees the whole thing took on an unnaturally tragic air of the impossible. He accustomed himself not to think of it, as he did with many other things that he might have wished different, and threw himself with his whole soul into the situation as it was, without any conscious attempts to make it over by dreams or cover its defects with imaginary festoons and garlands. But, oh, how sweet it was to love for once with the love of real life; for now he knew that nothing of what he had imagined to be love was real love, neither the turgid longing of the lonely youth, nor the passionate yearning of the dreamer, nor yet the nervous foreboding of the child. These were currents in the ocean of love, single reflections of its full light, fragments of love as the meteors rushing through space are splinters of a world—for that was love: a world complete in itself, fully rounded, vast, and orderly. It was no medley of confused sensations and moods rushing one upon another! Love was like nature, ever changing, ever renewing; no feeling died and no emotion withered without giving life to the seed of something still more perfect which was imbedded in it. Quietly, sanely, with full, deep breaths—it was good to love so and love with all his soul. The days fell, bright and new-coined, down from heaven itself; they no longer followed one upon another as a matter of course like the hackneyed pictures in a peep-show. Every one was a revelation. With each day that passed, he felt stronger, greater, and nobler. He had never known such strength and fullness of feeling; there were moments when he seemed to himself titanic, much more than man, so inexhaustible was the wellspring of his soul, so broad-winged the tenderness that swelled his heart, so wondrous the sweep of his vision, so infinite the gentleness of his judgments.

This was the beginning of happiness, and they were happy long.

The daily falsehood and deception and the atmosphere of dishonor in which they lived had not yet gained power over them, and could not touch them on those ecstatic heights to which Niels had lifted their relationship and, with it, themselves. For he was not simply a man who seduced his friend’s wife—or rather, so he told himself defiantly, he was that man, but he was also the one who saved an innocent woman whom life had wounded, stoned, and defiled, a woman who had lain down to let her soul die. This woman he had given back her confidence in life, her faith in the powers of good; he had lifted her spirit to noble heights, had given her happiness. What, then, was best, the old blameless misery or that which he had won for her? He did not ask, he had made his choice.

He did not quite mean this, if the truth were told. Man often builds for himself theories in which he refuses to dwell. Thoughts often run faster than the sense of right and wrong is willing to follow. Yet the conception was really present in his mind, and it took away some of the cankerous venom inherent in the craftiness, falseness, and duplicity of their lives.

Yet the evil effects were soon noticeable. The poison was working on so many fine nerve filaments that it could not but do harm and cause suffering, and the time was hastened when Erik, shortly after New Year, announced that he had caught an idea—something with a green tunic and a threatening attitude, he told Niels. Did he remember the green in Salvator Rosa’s Jonah? Something on that order.

Although Erik’s work consisted chiefly in lying on the couch in his studio, smoking shag and reading Marryat, it had at least the effect of keeping him at home for the time being, thereby forcing them to use more caution and necessitating new lies and artifices.

Fennimore’s ingenuity in this direction was what brought the first cloud to their heaven. It was scarcely perceptible at first, only a doubt, light as thistle-down, flitting through Niels’s mind as to whether his love were not nobler than the one he loved. It had not yet taken shape as a thought, it was only a dim foreboding which pointed in that direction, a vague giving way in his mind, a leaning to that side.

Yet it came again and brought others in its wake, thoughts at first vague and indistinct, then clearer and sharper for each time they appeared. It was astonishing with what furious haste these thoughts could undermine, debase, and take away the glamor. Their love was not lessened. On the contrary, it glowed more passionately while it sank, but these handclasps stolen under table-covers, these kisses snatched in passages and behind doors, these long looks right under the eyes of him they deceived, took away all the lofty tenor. Happiness no longer stood still above their heads; they had to filch her smiles and her light as best they could, and after a while their wiles and cunning were no longer necessary evils, but amusing triumphs. Deception became their natural element and made them contemptible and petty. There were degrading secrets, too, over which they had hitherto grieved separately, assuming ignorance in each other’s eyes, but which they now had to share; for Erik was not bashful, and would often caress his wife in Niels’s presence, kiss her, take her on his lap, and embrace her, while Fennimore had neither courage nor dignity sufficient to repel these caresses; the consciousness of her guilt made her uncertain and afraid.

So it sank and went on sinking, that lofty castle of their love, from the pinnacles of which they had gazed so proudly out over the world, and within which they had felt so strong and noble.

Still they were happy among the ruins.

When they walked in the woods now, it was usually on gloomy days, when the fog hung under the dark branches and thickened between the wet trunks, so that none should see how they kissed and embraced, both here and there, and none should hear how their frivolous talk rang with peals of wanton laughter.

The melancholy of eternity, which had exalted their love, was gone; now there was nothing but smiles and jests between them. With feverish haste they snatched greedily at the fleeting seconds of joy, as though they must hurry in their love and had not a lifetime before them.

It brought no change when Erik, after a while, grew tired of his idea and again began his carousing so eagerly that he was rarely at home for forty-eight hours at a stretch. Where they had fallen, there they lay. Once in a great while, perhaps, in lonely hours, they gazed regretfully toward the heights from which they had fallen, or perhaps they only wondered, and thought what a strain it must have been to stay on that level, and felt themselves more snugly housed where they were. There was no change. At least there was no return to the former days, but the flabby uncleanness of living as they did and not running away together became more present in their consciousness and linked them together in a closer and baser union through the common sense of guilt; for neither of them wished any change in things as they were. Nor did they pretend to each other that they did, for there had developed a cynical intimacy between them such as often exists between fellow criminals, and there was nothing in their relations that they shrank from putting into words. With sinister frankness, they called things by their right names and, as they put it to themselves, faced the facts as they were.

* * * * *

In February it had seemed that the winter was over, but then Mother March had come shaking her white mantle with its loose lining, and snowstorm after snowstorm covered the ground with thick layers. Then followed calm weather and hard frost, and the fjord settled under a crust of ice six inches thick, which lay there a long time.

One evening toward the end of the month, Fennimore was sitting alone in her parlor after tea and waiting.

The room was brightly illumined; the piano stood open with candles lit, and the silk shade had been taken from the lamp. The gilded moldings caught the light, and the pictures on the walls seemed to stand out with a kind of vigilance. The hyacinths had been moved from the windows to the writing-table, where they made a mass of delicate colors, filling the air with a penetrating fragrance that seemed cool in its purity. The fire in the stove burned with a pleasant subdued crackle.

Fennimore was walking up and down the room almost as if she were balancing on a dark red stripe in the carpet. She wore a somewhat old-fashioned black silk dress with a heavily embroidered edge that weighed it down and trailed, first on one side, then on the other, with every step she took.

She was humming to herself and holding with both hands a string of large pale yellow amber beads that hung from her neck. Whenever she wavered on the red stripe, she would stop humming, but still grasped the necklace. Perhaps she was making an omen for herself: if she could walk a certain number of times up and down without getting off the red stripe and without letting go with her hands, Niels would come.

He had been there in the morning, when Erik went away, and had stayed till late in the afternoon, but he had promised to come again as soon as the moon was up and it was light enough to see the holes in the ice on the fjord.

Fennimore had obtained her omen, whatever it was, and stepped over to the window.

It looked as if there would not be any moon to-night; the sky was very black, and the darkness must be more intense out there on the gray-blue fjord than on land where the snow lay. Perhaps it was best that he did not attempt it. She sat down at the piano with a sigh of resignation, then got up again to look at the clock. She came back and resolutely propped up a big book of music before her, but did not play, merely turning the leaves absent-mindedly, lost in her own thoughts.

Suppose, after all, that he was standing on the opposite shore this very moment, fastening on his skates. He could be here in an instant! She saw him plainly, a little bit out of breath after skating, and blinking with his eyes against the light on coming from the darkness outside. He would bring a breath of cold air, and his beard would be full of tiny little bright drops. Then he would say—what would he say?

She smiled and glanced down at herself.

And still the moon did not appear.

She went over to the window again and stood gazing out, till the darkness seemed to be filled before her eyes with tiny white sparks and rainbow-colored rings. But they were only a vague glimmer. She wished they would be transformed into fireworks out there, rockets shooting up in long, long curves and then turning to tiny snakes that bored their way into the sky and died in a flicker; or into a great, huge pale ball that hung tremulous in the sky and slowly sank down in a rain of myriad-colored stars. Look! Look! Soft and rounded like a curtsy, like a golden rain that curtsied.—Farewell! Farewell! There went the last one.—Oh dear, if he would only come! She did not want to play—and at that she turned to the piano, struck an octave harshly, and held the keys down till the tones had quite died away, then did the same again, and again, and yet again. She did not want to play, did not want to.—She would rather dance! For a moment she closed her eyes, and in imagination she felt herself whirling through a vast hall of red and white and gold. How delicious it would be to have danced and to be hot and tired and drink champagne! Suddenly she remembered how she and a school friend had concocted champagne from soda water and eau de cologne, and how sick it had made them when they drank it.

She straightened herself and walked across the room, instinctively smoothing her dress as after a dance.

“And now let us be sensible!” she said, took her embroidery and settled herself in a large armchair near the lamp.

Yet she did not work; her hands sank down into her lap, and soon she snuggled down into the chair with little lazy movements, fitting herself into its curves, her face resting on her hand, her dress wrapped around her feet.

She wondered curiously whether other wives were like her, whether they had made a mistake and been unhappy and then had loved some one else. She passed in review the ladies at home in Fjordby, one by one. Then she thought of Mrs. Boye. Niels had told her about Mrs. Boye, and she had always been a tantalizing riddle to her—this woman whom she hated and felt humiliated by.

Erik, too, had once told her that he had been madly in love with Mrs. Boye.

Ah, if one could know everything about her!

She laughed at the thought of Mrs. Boye’s new husband.

All the time, while her thoughts were thus engaged, she was longing and listening for Niels, and imagined him coming, always coming out there on the ice. She little guessed that for the last two hours a tiny black dot had been working its way over the snowy meadows with a message for her very different from the one she was expecting from across the fjord. It was only a man in homespun and greased boots, and now he tapped on the kitchen window, frightening the maid.

It was a letter, Trine said when she came in to her mistress. Fennimore took it. It was a telegram. Quietly she gave the maid the receipt and dismissed her; she was not in the least alarmed, for Erik of late had often telegraphed that he would bring one or two guests home with him the following day.

Then she read.

Suddenly she turned white and darted wildly from her seat out into the middle of the room, staring at the door with expectant terror.

She would not let it come into the house, did not dare to, and with one bound she threw herself against the door, pressing her shoulder against it, and turned the key till it cut her hand. But it would not turn, no matter how hard she tried. Her hand dropped. Then she remembered that the thing was not here at all—it was far away from her in a strange house.

She began to shake, her knees would no longer support her, and she slid along the door to the floor.

Erik was dead. The horses had run away, had overturned the carriage at a street corner, and hurled Erik with his head against the wall. His skull had been fractured, and now he lay dead at Aalborg. That was the way it had happened, and most of this story was told in the telegram. No one had been with him in the carriage except the white-necked tutor known as the Arab. It was he who had telegraphed.

She crouched on the floor moaning feebly, both palms spread out on the carpet, her eyes staring with a fixed, empty look, as she swayed helplessly to and fro.

Only a moment ago everything had been light and fragrance around her, and, however much she tried, she could not instantly put all this out of her consciousness to admit the inky black night of grief and remorse. It was not her fault that her mind was still haunted by fitful, dazzling gleams of love’s happiness and love’s pleasure; that intense, foolish desires would force their way out of the whirl, seeking the bliss of forgetfulness, or trying to stop with a frenzied wrench the revolving wheel of fortune.

But it soon passed.

In black swarms, from everywhere, dark thoughts came flying like ravens, lured by the corpse of her happiness, and hacked it beak by beak, even while the warmth of life still lingered in it. They tore and slashed and made it hideous and unrecognizable, until the whole thing was nothing but a carrion of loathing and horror.

She rose and walked about, supporting herself by chairs and tables like one who is ill. Desperately she looked around for some cobweb of help, if it were only a comforting glance, a sympathetic pat of the hand, but her eyes met nothing but the glaring family portraits, all the strangers who had been witnesses of her fall and her crime—sleepy old gentlemen, prim-mouthed matrons, and their ever-present gnome child, the girl with the great round eyes and bulging forehead. It had acquired memories enough at last, this strange furniture, the table over there, and that chair, the footstool with the black poodle-dog, and the portière like a dressing-gown,—she had saturated them all with memories, adulterous memories, which they now spewed out and flung after her. Oh, it was terrible to be locked in with all these spectres of crime and with herself. She shuddered at herself; she pointed accusing fingers at herself, at this dishonored Fennimore who crouched at her feet; she pulled her dress away from between her imploring hands. Mercy? No, there was no mercy! How could there be mercy before those dead eyes in the strange town, those eyes which had become seeing, now that they were glazed in death, and saw how she had thrown his honor in the mud, lied at his lips, been faithless at his heart.

She could feel those dead eyes riveted on her; she did not know whence they came, but they followed her, gliding down her body like two ice-cold rays. As she looked down, while every thread of the carpet, every stitch in the footstools, seemed unnaturally clear in the strong, sharp light, she felt something walking about her with the footsteps of dead men, felt it brushing against her dress so distinctly that she screamed with terror, and darted to one side. But it came in front of her like hands and yet not like hands, something that clutched at her slowly, clutched derisively and triumphantly at her heart, that marvel of treachery, that yellow pearl of deceit! And she retreated till she backed up against the table, but it was still there, and her bosom gave no protection against it; it clutched through her skin and flesh.... She almost died of terror, as she stood there, helplessly bending back over the table, while every nerve contracted with fear, and her eyes stared as if they were being murdered in their sockets.

Then that passed.

She looked around with a haunted look, then sank down on her knees and prayed a long time. She repented and confessed, wildly and unrestrainedly, in growing passion, with the same fanatic self-loathing that drives the nun to scourge her naked body. She sought fervently after the most grovelling expressions, intoxicating herself with self-abasement and with a humility that thirsted for degradation.

At last she rose. Her bosom heaved violently, and there was a faint light in the pale cheeks, which seemed to have grown fuller during her prayer.

She looked around the room as if she were taking a silent vow. Then she went into the adjoining room, closed the door after her, stood still a moment as though to accustom herself to the darkness, groped her way to the door which opened on the glass-enclosed veranda, and went out.

It was lighter there. The moon had risen, and shone through the close-packed frozen crystals on the glass; the light came yellowish through the panes, blue and red through the squares of colored glass that framed them.

She melted a hole in the ice with her hand and carefully wiped away the moisture with her handkerchief.

As yet there was no one in sight out on the fjord.

She began to walk up and down in her glass cage. There was no furniture out there except a settee of cane and bent wood, covered with withered ivy leaves from the vines overhead. Every time she passed it, the leaves rustled faintly with the stirring of the air, and now and then her dress caught a leaf on the floor, drawing it along with a scratching sound over the boards.

Back and forth she walked on her dreary watch, her arms folded over her breast, hardening herself against the cold.

He came.

She opened the door with a quick wrench, and stepped out into the frozen snow in her thin shoes. She had no pity on herself, she could have gone bare-footed to that meeting.

Niels had slowed up at the sight of the black figure against the snow and was skating toward land with hesitating, tentative strokes.

That stealthy figure seemed to burn into her eyes. Every familiar movement and feature struck her as a shameless insult, as a boast of degrading secrets. She shook with hatred; her heart swelled with curses, and she could scarcely control her anger.

“It is I!” she cried out to him jeeringly, “the harlot, Fennimore!”

“But for God’s sake, sweetheart?” he asked, astonished, as he came within a few feet of her.

“Erik is dead.”

“Dead! When?” He had to step out into the snow with his skates to keep from falling. “Oh, but tell me!” Eagerly he took a step nearer.

They were now standing close together, and she had to restrain herself from striking that pale, distorted face with her clenched fist.

“I will tell you, never fear,” she cried. “He is dead, as I said. He had a runaway in Aalborg and got his head crushed, while we were deceiving him here.”

“It is terrible!” Niels moaned, pressing his hands to his temples. “Who could have dreamed—Oh, I wish we had been faithful to him, Fennimore! Erik, poor Erik!—I wish I were in his place!“ He sobbed aloud, writhing with pain.

“I hate you, Niels Lyhne!”

“Oh, what does it matter about us?” Niels groaned; “if we could only get him back! Poor Fennimore!” he said with a change of feeling. “Never mind me. You hate me, you say? You may well hate me.” He rose suddenly. “Let us go in,” he said. “I don’t know what I am saying. Who was it that telegraphed, did you say?”

“In!” Fennimore screamed, infuriated by his failure to notice her hostility. “In there! Never shall you set your craven, despicable foot inside that house again. How dare you think of it, you wretch, you false dog, who came sneaking in here and stole your friend’s honor, because it was too poorly hidden! What, did you not steal it under his very eyes, because he thought you were honest, you house-thief!”

“Hush, hush, are you mad? What is the matter with you! What sort of language are you using?” He had caught her arm firmly, drawing her to him, and looked straight into her face in amazement. “You must try to come to your senses, child,” he said in a gentler tone. “You can’t mend matters by slinging ugly words.”

She wrenched her arm away with such force that he staggered and almost lost his uncertain foothold.

“Can’t you hear that I hate you!” she screamed shrilly. “And isn’t there so much of a decent man’s brain left in you that you can understand it! How blind I must have been when I loved you, you patched together with lies, when I had him at my side, who was ten thousand times better than you. I shall hate and despise you to the end of my life. Before you came, I was honest, I had never done anything wicked; but then you came with your poetry and your rubbish and dragged me down with your lies, into the mud with you. What have I done to you that you could not leave me alone—I who should have been sacred to you above all others! Now I have to live day after day with this shameful blot on my soul, and I shall never meet any one so base but that I know myself to be baser. All the memories of my girlhood you have poisoned. What have I to look back on that is clean and good now! You have tainted everything. It is not only he that is dead, everything bright and good that has been between us is dead, too, and rotten. Oh, God help me, is it fair that I can’t get any revenge on you after all you have done? Make me honest again, Niels Lyhne, make me pure and good again! No, no—but it ought to be possible to torture you into undoing the wrong you have done. Can you undo it with lies? Don’t stand there and crouch under your own helplessness. I want to see you suffer, here before my eyes, and writhe in pain and despair and be miserable. Let him be miserable, God, do not let him steal my revenge too! Go, you wretch, go! I cast you off, but be sure that I drag you with me through all the agonies my hate can call down over you.”

She had stretched out her arms menacingly. Now she turned and went in, and the veranda door rattled softly, as she closed it.

Niels stood looking after her in amazement, almost with disbelief. That pale, vengeful face seemed to be still there before him, so strangely base-souled and coarse, all its delicate beauty of contour gone, as if a rough, barbarous hand had ploughed up all its lines.

He stumbled cautiously down to the ice and began to skate slowly toward the mouth of the fjord, with the moonlight in front of him and the wind in his back. Gradually he increased his speed, as his thoughts took his attention from the surroundings, till the ice splinters flew from the runners of his skates and rattled on the smooth surface, blown along with him by the rising frost wind.

So that was the end! So that was the way he had saved this woman soul and lifted it and given it happiness! It was certainly beautiful, his relation to the dead friend, his childhood friend, for whom he would have sacrificed his future, his life, his all! He with his sacrificing and his saving! Let heaven and earth behold in him a man who preserved his life on the heights of honor without spot or blemish in order not to cast a shadow over the Idea he served and was called to promulgate.

No doubt that was another of his boastful fancies that his paltry little life could put spots on the sun of the Idea. Good God, he was always taking these high and mighty views of himself, it was bred in his bone. If he could not be anything better, he must at least be a Judas and call himself Iscariot in grandiose gloom. That sounded like something. Was he forever going to put on airs as if he were a responsible minister to the Idea, a member of its privy council, getting everything concerning humanity at first hand! Would he never learn to do his duty in barrack service for the Idea with all simplicity as a private of a very subordinate class?

There were red fires out on the ice, and he skated so near them that a gigantic shadow shot out for a moment from his feet, turned forward, and disappeared again.

He thought of Erik and of what kind of a friend he had been to Erik. He! His childhood memories wrung their hands over him; his youthful dreams covered their heads and wept over him; his whole past stared after him with a long look full of reproach. He had betrayed it all for a love as small and mean as himself. There _had_ been exaltation in this love, but he had betrayed that too.

Whither could he flee to escape these attempts that always ended in the ditch? All his life had been nothing else, and it would never be anything else in the future; he knew that and felt it with such certainty that he sickened at the thought of all this futile endeavor, and he wished with all his soul that he could run away and escape this meaningless fate. If only the ice would break under him now as he skated, and all would be over with a gasp and a spasm in the cold water!

He stopped, exhausted, and looked back. The moon had gone down, and the fjord stretched long and dark between the white hills on either side. Then he turned and worked his way back against the wind. It was very strong now, and he was tired. He skated closer to the shore to get the shelter of the hills, but, as he struggled thus, he came on a hole in the ice made by the winds sweeping down from the hills, and he felt the thin, elastic crust give way under him with a crackling sound.

Ah, he breathed more easily, in spite of all, when he set foot on the firm ice again! Under the stimulus of fear, his exhaustion had almost left him, and he skated on vigorously.

* * * * *

While he was struggling out there, Fennimore sat in the lighted room, baffled and miserable. She felt herself cheated out of her revenge. She hardly knew what she had expected, but it was something entirely different; she had had a vision of something mighty and majestic, something of swords and red flames, or—not that, but something that would sweep her along and lift her to a throne, but instead it had all turned out so small and paltry, and she had felt more like a common scold than like one who utters curses....

After all, she had learned something from Niels.

* * * * *

Early in the morning of the following day, while Niels, overcome with exhaustion, was still asleep, she left the house.

_Chapter XII_

For the better part of two years Niels Lyhne had roamed about on the Continent.

He was very lonely, without kith or kin or any close friend of his heart. Yet there was another and greater loneliness that encompassed him; for however desolate and forsaken a man may feel when he has no single spot on all this vast earth to which his affections can cling, which he can bless when the heart _will_ overflow and yearn for when longing _will_ spread its wings, there is no existence so lonely that he is utterly alone if he can only see the fixed bright star of a life goal shining overhead. But Niels Lyhne had no star. He did not know what to do with himself and his gifts. It was all very well to have talent if he could only have used it, but he went about like a painter without hands. How he envied the people, great and small, who always, whenever they reached out into life, found a handle to lay hold of; for he could never find any handle. It seemed as though he could do nothing but sing over again the old romantic songs, and in truth he had so far done nothing else. His talent was like something apart in him, a quiet Pompeii, or a harp that had to be taken out of its corner. It was not all-pervading, did not run down the street with him or tingle in his finger-tips—not in the least. His talent had no grip on him. Sometimes it seemed to him that he had been born half a century too late, sometimes that he had come altogether too early. His talent was rooted in something of the past; it could not draw nourishment from his opinions, his convictions, and his sympathies, could not absorb them and give them form. The two elements seemed always to be gliding apart like water and oil, which can be shaken together, but can never mix, never become one.

Gradually, as he began to realize this, he sank into a boundless dejection and grew inclined to take an ironic, suspicious view of himself and his whole past. There must be something wrong with him, he told himself, something incurably wrong in the very marrow of his being; for surely a man could fuse the varying elements in his own nature—that he firmly believed.

This was the state of his mind when he settled down, in the month of September, toward the end of the second year of his exile, on the shores of Lake Garda, in the little town of Riva.

Not long afterward, the region was hedged about by difficulties that put a stop to travelling and kept all strangers away. Cholera had broken out round about Venice and down south in Descensano and in the north by the Trentino. Under these circumstances, Riva was not lively, for the hotels had been emptied at the first rumor, and tourists bound for Italy took another route.

Naturally, the few people who remained drew all the more closely together.

The most remarkable person among them was a famous opera singer, whose real name was Madame Odéro. Her stage name was far more celebrated. She and her companion, Niels, and a deaf doctor from Vienna were the only guests at the Golden Sun, the leading hotel in town.

Niels felt very much attracted to her, and she yielded to that warmth of manner in him which is often a characteristic of people who are at strife with themselves and therefore feel the need of establishing their relations with others on a safe basis.